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Fried Onions

Fried onions are thinly sliced onions cooked in butter and oil until lightly browned, served over steak or mixed with potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fried Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onions very finely in a wooden bowl.

Cook

  1. Heat the butter and oil in a pan.

  2. Fry the onions until they are light brown.

Serve

  1. Serve over steak or mix with potatoes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning and sweetness develop as their sugars caramelise during frying.
Butter
Adds fat for frying and a rich, nutty aroma as it browns.
Oil
Raises the frying temperature and keeps the butter from burning quickly.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until they are light brown. Frying slowly over moderate heat lets the onion sugars caramelise evenly. Too much heat scorches the outside before the inside softens, leaving a bitter taste.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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